Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Once the story was posted, Cooper sent it to other political journalists, including Mark Halperin, who oversaw The Note, an ABC News tip sheet closely read by political reporters. The piece, Cooper said in an e-mail to Halperin, “might get a pop.”

  THAT morning’s Wall Street Journal carried an editorial wondering why the White House had become so defensive regarding the sixteen words. The paper was in essence speaking for Libby.

  “Our puzzlement,” the editorialists wrote, “is even greater now that we’ve learned what last October’s national intelligence estimate really said.” The Journal’s editorial page had been told about parts of the NIE—but only passages that bolstered the White House’s case. The editorial quoted specific sentences related to the Niger charge—but not the INR dissent—and argued that Bush had been right to include the uranium-in-Africa allegation in the State of the Union speech. The Journal errantly claimed that the presumably reliable British intelligence service had provided the original report on the Niger deal. (In fact, the Italians had.) And the editorial added, “The decision to disarm the Iraqi dictator wasn’t based on a single intelligence report but on a mountain of evidence compiled over a dozen years.”

  How had the Journal’s conservative editorial writers gained access to these White House–friendly portions of the NIE? “This information…does not come from the White House,” the editorial asserted, without revealing the source. But years later, a special counsel would note that Libby had passed portions of the NIE—through another government official—to the Journal before the editorial appeared. After trying to use Judy Miller to disseminate a distorted (dissent-free) version of the Niger story and failing, Libby had turned to The Wall Street Journal. This time he succeeded.

  THAT day, the president’s most loyal ally, Tony Blair, stopped off in Washington for a quick visit. Blair addressed a joint session of Congress and left open the possibility that no weapons of mass destruction would be located. “Let us say one thing: if we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering,” Blair said. “That is something I am confident history will forgive.”

  After the speech, Bush and the prime minister met at the White House and spoke to reporters. When a journalist pointed out that Blair had “opened the door to the possibility that you may be proved wrong about the threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,” Bush shot back, “We won’t be proven wrong.” He then added, “I believe that we will find the truth. And the truth is, he was developing a program for weapons of mass destruction…. We will bring the weapons, and of, of course—we will bring the information forward on the weapons when they find them. And that will end up—end all this speculation…. And that’s what’s going to happen.” Programs and weapons: Bush was yet again merging the two.

  Then Blair took off for Tokyo. While his plane was in the air, a darker Iraq weapons drama—involving intelligence, the media, and leaks—played out to a tragic conclusion in England.

  Two days earlier, on July 15, the House of Commons foreign affairs committee had held a hearing to question David Kelly, a fifty-nine-year-old Oxford-educated microbiologist and former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, who had served as senior adviser to the Ministry of Defence on WMDs. Weeks earlier, Kelly had acknowledged to his superiors that he had spoken to BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan shortly before Gilligan broadcast the story charging that the Blair administration had “sexed up” its 2002 white paper on Iraq’s weapons by including the claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty-five minutes. Kelly had had qualms about this allegation, but he maintained that he hadn’t told Gilligan that the dossier had been “sexed up.” Blair administration officials saw Kelly as a witness who could prove the BBC report was a fabrication, and they leaked word that he had been Gilligan’s source. (“It would fuck Gilligan if [Kelly] was his source,” Alistair Campbell, Blair’s communications chief, who had been in charge of the white paper’s production, wrote in his diary.) It was unclear, though, whether Kelly had been Gilligan’s main source. In any event, Kelly became the center of a media frenzy.

  At the hearing, Kelly, a private man, looked nervous and uncomfortable hunched over the witness table. Some MPs loudly demanded that he explain his dealings with Gilligan, hoping to discredit the BBC reporter. MPs critical of the government suggested that Kelly was being unfairly used by Blair officials for their own political purposes. “Have you ever felt like a fall guy?” one MP asked him. “You have been set up, have you not?” Kelly spoke so quietly that the MPs could barely hear him. And when asked if he had been Gilligan’s primary source, he said he didn’t think so.

  For years, Kelly had been a source for reporters on Iraq and weapons issues. But after being dragged into the limelight, he told friends, he felt “physically sick.” He had become a battering ram for both sides in England’s version of the Iraq WMD debate. Two days after the hearing, he responded to a New York Times reporter who had e-mailed him offering encouragement. The reporter was Judith Miller. Kelly had been a source for her on WMD issues, and at 11:18 A.M. that Thursday, he sent her an e-mail that cryptically noted that there were “many dark actors playing games.” He then thanked Miller for her support and friendship.

  It was the last e-mail Kelly ever sent.

  That afternoon, Kelly took a long stroll down a woodland path outside the village of Southmoor, where he lived. He walked atop a small mound, swallowed tablets of coproxamol, a prescription painkiller, and then slashed his left wrist with a knife. His body was found by police the next morning.

  THROUGHOUT that week in Washington, news continued to dribble out about those sixteen words. The story wouldn’t go away. And the White House took an unusual step: it decided to publicly release certain portions of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMDs. Scooter Libby’s selective leaking of NIE excerpts to Judy Miller and The Wall Street Journal—leaks authorized by Bush and directed by Cheney—had not helped.

  White House staffers hoped (as had Bush and Cheney) that by disclosing the NIE’s chief findings—that “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons” and “probably” would have a nuclear weapon “if left unchecked…during this decade”—they could demonstrate that the president had invaded Iraq on the basis of a definitive CIA judgment. But the White House, unlike Libby, also made available several of the muddled passages from the NIE (which made the overarching key judgments seem less definitive) and the various dissents, including the State Department’s conclusion that the yellowcake claim was “highly dubious.”

  During a background briefing for reporters in the White House pressroom, Bartlett read through the NIE excerpts. He acknowledged there had been dissents on the aluminum tubes, the Niger deal, and the overall nuclear case. But he insisted it was the dominant NIE conclusions that had formed the basis of Bush’s decision to go to war. When Bartlett finished his presentation, the reporters threw questions at him.

  “When did the president read this NIE?” one wanted to know.

  He never did, Bartlett said: “The President has been briefed on more than—countless conversations with his national—with intelligence community about the contents of the NIE. I don’t think he sat down over a long weekend and read every word of it. But he’s familiar, intimately familiar with the case….”

  “So,” this reporter followed up, “this would have been read, presumably, by the national security adviser, and then she would have briefed the president on it?”

  Not exactly, Bartlett said; we have “experts who work for the national security adviser who would know this information, who understand the information.”

  The questions kept coming. “Last week,” a reporter asked, “[Rice] told us that neither she nor the president were aware of any concerns about the quality of the intelligence underlying this allegation. Given that [there] is a [dissenting] footnote [in the NIE about the Niger charge]…how is it possible that the national security adviser and the president
would not have been aware of those reservations?”

  The answer was simple, according to Bartlett: “They did not read footnotes in a ninety-page document.” It was the “majority opinion” about Saddam’s broader program that mattered, Bartlett said, not individual dissents about particular pieces of intelligence.

  Some reporters were incredulous.

  “The words ‘highly dubious,’ that’s the State Department’s intelligence arm saying ‘highly dubious,’ ” said one. “Is the president comfortable about making assertions that the State Department thinks are highly dubious?”

  Bartlett replied, “The president was comfortable at the time, based on the information that was provided in his speech. The president of the United States is not a fact checker.”

  The release of the NIE was supposed to tamp down the controversy, but Bartlett’s concessions were damning. The White House communications director was acknowledging that Bush and Rice hadn’t read the NIE and hadn’t delved into details of the debate about Iraq intelligence. Even though prewar media reports had noted there was a sharp difference of opinion among analysts about the most critical piece of evidence for the nuclear case—the aluminum tubes—Bush and Rice hadn’t taken any steps to get to the bottom of the dispute. Bartlett was trying to defend the White House. But he was presenting a picture of a commander in chief who had shown little—or no—interest in sorting out the disagreements among his intelligence agencies. Bush had issued definitive public statements about the gathering menace posed by Iraq’s weapons programs without ever having read the fine print.*61

  THE Novak column had not received as much attention as some in the White House had hoped. Days after its appearance, Bush aides, including Rove, were still pointing reporters to the article and its disclosure about Valerie Wilson. On Sunday, July 20, Andrea Mitchell of NBC called Wilson and said that she was being told by sources in the White House that “the real story here is…Wilson and his wife.” Mitchell later told Newsweek she said to Wilson, “I heard in the White House that people were touting the Novak column and that was the real story.” She didn’t say to whom she had spoken.

  The next day, Rove’s secretary e-mailed Levine looking for Chris Matthews’s phone number. Rove had just returned from San Francisco, where he had attended the annual male-only retreat of corporate, political, and media bigwigs at Bohemian Grove and had run into Matthews. (The secretive gathering was “essentially a summer camp for rich white men” with lots of alcohol and male bonding in the woods, according to someone who attended the retreat that summer.) Rove wanted to talk to the cable television host again. Levine was nervous about Rove contacting the antiwar Matthews, who had been championing Wilson. As Levine later recounted, he sent Rove an e-mail: “Before you talk to Matthews, you need to talk to me.” But it was too late. Rove had already called.

  Rove’s phone call with Matthews revealed much about his attitude toward the entire Wilson affair. He was not apologetic or defensive about the outing of Valerie Wilson. As Matthews later described the conversation to colleagues, Rove considered the Wilson dust-up to be a political war, and he saw Valerie Wilson as a full-fledged combatant on the other side—not an innocent bystander. Matthews was surprised by Rove’s ferocity. Rove, Matthews told a colleague, was “pretty revved up on the issue” and said that the Wilsons “were trying to screw the White House so the White House was going to screw them back.” After Matthews finished talking to Rove, he called Joe Wilson and, according to Wilson, said, “I just got off the phone with Karl Rove. He says, and I quote, ‘Wilson’s wife is fair game.’ ”*62 (A Rove spokesperson later said that Rove had called Matthews to say it was “reasonable to discuss who sent Wilson to Niger.”)

  ON JULY 22, Newsday ran a piece by Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce that drew a new round of attention to the Plame leak. The story quoted unnamed intelligence officials confirming that Valerie Wilson was an undercover CIA officer working on WMD issues and that Novak’s administration sources might well have broken the law by disclosing her classified CIA employment to the journalist. The story also quoted Frank Anderson, a former CIA Near East Division chief: “When it gets to the point of an administration official acting to do career damage, and possibly actually endanger someone, that’s mean, that’s petty, it’s irresponsible.” Novak told Newsday, “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.” That made it seem as if his sources had purposefully planted the leak with him. (Later, though, Novak would say he misspoke when he gave this account.)

  Though the leak had yet to become much of a news story, at that day’s White House press briefing, Scott McClellan, who had replaced Ari Fleischer as press secretary the previous week, was asked to respond to “accusations that the administration deliberately blew the cover of an undercover CIA operative, and in so doing, violated a federal law that prohibits revealing the identity of undercover CIA operatives.” McClellan replied, “That is not the way this president or this White House operates.”

  Just that day, Democrats had started calling for an investigation of the leak. Senator Jay Rockefeller decried the leak as “vile” and a “highly dishonorable thing to do.” Senator Dick Durbin accused the White House of going after anyone who questioned how the administration had made its case for war. Senator Tom Daschle urged a probe. Would the White House, the reporter asked McClellan, support an inquiry? “I think that’s suggesting that there might be some truth to the matter you’re bringing up,” McClellan said. “I have seen nothing—I have seen nothing to suggest that there is any truth to it…. But let me make it very clear, that’s just not the way this White House operates.”

  JULY 22 should have been a day of celebration at the White House. The news out of Baghdad that morning was positive: Uday and Qusay Hussein, the dictator’s vicious sons, had been killed in a shoot-out with the U.S. military. Defense Department officials expressed hope that this would demonstrate to the Iraqis that the old tyrannical regime was truly gone and be a psychological blow to a resistance that had yet to wither away.

  But the White House staff was in turmoil, bracing for what aides feared could be the worst day yet in the never-ending yellowcake affair. Late the previous Friday night—hours after Tenet had issued the double-edged statement accepting responsibility for the sixteen-word mistake—Mike Gerson, Bush’s chief speechwriter, had discovered in his files the memo that had been sent to him and Hadley by the CIA on October 5, 2002, requesting that the White House remove the uranium claims from the Cincinnati speech. The memo not only questioned elements of the Niger case, it explicitly challenged the British government’s position: “We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue.” Then on Monday evening, after the White House told Tenet that it had come across the October 5 memo, the CIA had located the follow-up memo sent to Hadley and Rice on October 6, 2002. The second memo elaborated on the reasons the CIA didn’t believe the uranium claims. It stated—loud and clear—that “the Africa story is overblown.” Tenet forwarded a copy of this second memo to the White House on Tuesday morning.

  Eleven days previously, the White House had blamed the CIA for the sixteen words. Now aides were aware of documents showing that the national security adviser, the deputy national security adviser, and the chief speechwriter had ignored clear warnings from the CIA.

  The White House’s position—dump-it-on-the-CIA—was no longer defendable. Hadley told his colleagues that he had simply forgotten about the memos. He offered to resign, but the president refused to accept the offer, according to two NSC officials. And White House aides decided that there would have to be another press briefing—so Hadley could come clean. It had to happen right away. Otherwise, the Bush aides figured, the CIA would leak these memos. As Bartlett and other communications staffers assembled in McClellan’s office that morning to plan their press strategy, Hadley offered up a piece of Godfather humor. “We’re here to make peace between the families,” he said, according to Levine. He
was referring to the White House and the CIA.

  Hadley’s briefing in the Roosevelt Room that day was painful for White House aides. He reported that the memos the CIA had sent him indicated that the CIA had told Congress it had “concerns” pertaining to the British intelligence on the Niger charge. (He didn’t disclose that the memos said that the British had “exaggerated.”) He acknowledged he should have remembered the memos and had the sentence removed from the State of the Union speech. “It is now clear to me that I failed,” he said. Rice, he added, was also willing to take “personal responsibility” for the foul-up.

  White House aides viewed this episode as a victory for the CIA in the postinvasion spin battle between Langley and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. “We should never have gotten into a knife fight with the CIA,” John Gibson, the White House speechwriter, recalled saying to Gerson about this time. “Making Tenet say that statement [accepting fault for the sixteen words] was like opening up a hornet’s nest. [The CIA’s] job is to screw you.” Gerson, according to Gibson, was thinking along similar lines. “Why can’t we,” he asked Gibson, “get the CIA to stop regarding the White House like a foreign government?”

  INSIDE the CIA, there was anger at the White House, and the Valerie Wilson leak had intensified it. It was unclear what actual damage—if any—had been caused by the leak. Still, the idea that her identity would be exposed in the course of a political tussle rankled the rank and file. Valerie Wilson was not a widely known officer. She was one of the thousands of midlevel employees at the agency. “I asked Tenet if he knew who she was,” a senior CIA official later recalled, “and he said no.” But some CIA employees who had nothing to do with Valerie Wilson and her work were infuriated. “It was a matter of principle,” Mike Sulick, the deputy chief of the operations directorate, said. “For somebody at the White House to be outing somebody at the agency like this—it’s like giving away the name of a platoon leader in wartime. And especially coming from an administration that waves the flag and supports the troops—well, we’re part of the troops.”